HERMISTON — Shearer’s Foods announced it will not rebuild its Hermiston plant after a fire in February destroyed the facility.

Shearer’s estimated earlier this year that it would take 15 to 18 months to rebuild the plant.

“It was a difficult decision not to rebuild in Hermiston because of our dedicated employees and all the support we’ve received from the community over the years,” Shearer’s Foods Chairman and CEO Bill Nictakis said in a press release.

“As Shearer’s continues to grow, we have decided that it is in the company’s best interest to focus our resources on maximizing production at our other facilities.”

Hermiston Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan said the move not to rebuild will have little effect on the city’s economy.

“The plant closing doesn’t impact Hermiston from a property tax perspective because the plant was not located within the city limits,” he said. “However, Shearer’s was the only customer taking potable water from our regional water system.”

Morgan said Hermiston was anticipating receiving $210,000 in revenue from water sales to Shearer’s, but with the fire in February, it cut the actual revenue for the year to $115,000.

“We are now operating the system at a minimal level to maintain the asset without outside revenue coming in,” he said.

The company, which produced potato and corn chips for national chains, reported on Friday, Sept. 23, it notified employees of the decision earlier last week.

Shearer’s closed the Hermiston plant indefinitely after a boiler explosion and subsequent fire destroyed the facility. After the closure, Shearer’s in March reported it gave the 230 employees of the plant a severance package, based on tenure and unused vacation, and has worked with community organizations to help them find employment in the meantime.

The Hermiston Community Center was the site of a job fair in mid March.

“We had an amazing turnout of 42 businesses offering positions to the displaced workers,” Morgan remembered.

Shearer’s Foods also is encouraging employees willing to relocate to apply at other locations.

Morgan said it obviously unfortunate and distressing for the individual workers the fire displaced, but “it is positive to see that they were displaced into a job market that is operating in a way that most of them have likely been able to find reemployment by now.”

By July, he said, the county-wide unemployment rate was at an all-time low of 3.8%, down from the 4.1% in February at the time of the fire. Prior to that, he said, the lowest unemployment rate on records dating back to 2005 in Umatilla County was 4.1% in November, 2019 just before the pandemic.

Hermiston is looking to meet with Shearer’s officials to identify what their long-term plans are for the property itself, and how the city can assist the company in getting the site ready to market for other potential users.

Morgan said the site still is a good one due to its proximity to state freeways, Interstate 82 and Interstate 84.

“It also has a dedicated rail-spur onsite, has large-scale water on-site and all of the necessary power and gas are on-site,” he said. “So we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to work with the company to understand their long-range disposal plans for the property, and then work with our local agricultural production and processing community to find out what the potential market is for reuse of the site in a way that benefits all of our agricultural producers in the region.”

According to the Shearer’s Foods website, the Hermiston plant, which opened in 2010, was the company’s only production facility in the Pacific Northwest. The Ohio-based company’s other locations are in Ohio, Texas, Arkansas, Virginia, Iowa, Minnesota, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Ontario, Canada.